Thinking about life, faith and the world.

Stealing it Back – An Addendum

“…for we walk by faith, not by sight…” – 2 Corinthians 5:7 (NASB)

Something felt incomplete about my last post. I left out the flip side. I wrote about stealing back reason from the unbelieving, but this blog is also about stealing back belief from the unreasoning. If the doubters have stolen the mantle of reason, part of the blame lies with believers who have been content, if not eager, to give it away.

This is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of faith. In some minds, the words “blind” and “faith” have become inseparable. For the believer in Jesus Christ, those words should never go together. Our faith, our hope, is not an optimist’s wish. It’s a certainty, with a measure of trust in what we cannot see, but also a good deal of sight. Not that we walk by sight; to actually step out in our choice to believe takes faith, because we don’t have the full picture. But we come to that faith – or we should – on the basis of something more than a story we have heard.

I won’t go into the evidence here, but it’s plentiful, from the archaeological support for the Bible, to the miracles many have seen, to the cosmological questions that exhaust the capacity of science to answer. The evidence can’t bring you all the way to faith, but it can make the leap a bit more like rock-hopping than bungee jumping.